Justin Cappos (born February 27, 1977) is a computer scientist and cybersecurity expert whose data-security software has been adopted by a number of widely used open-source projects.
The topic of Cappos' Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Arizona was the Stork Project,[10] a software package manager he built with John H. Hartman, a professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Stork is still used today in some applications, but, more importantly, the project called attention to the need for improved security for software update processes, a research area Cappos has continued to pursue.
While a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington in 2009, Cappos also developed a peer-to-peer computing platform called Seattle,[11][12] which allows device-to-device connectivity in a decentralized network.
[25][26][27] To date, the list of tech companies and organizations using TUF include Foundries.io[28],IBM,[29] VMware,[30] Digital Ocean,[31] Microsoft,[32] Google,[33] Amazon,[34] Leap,[35] Kolide,[36] Docker,[37] and Cloudflare.
[44] To date, Uptane has been integrated into OTA Plus and ATS Garage, two over-the-air software update products from Advanced Telematic Systems, and is a key security component of the OTAmatic program created by Airbiquity.
[45][46] The Airbiquity project was honored with a BIG Award for Business in the 2017 New Product Category in January 2018, and Popular Science magazine named Uptane one of the top 100 inventions for 2017.
The framework gathers both key information and signatures from all who can access a piece of software through the various stages of coding, testing, building and packaging, thus making transparent all the steps that were performed, by whom and in what order.
[53] More recently, Cappos and his collaborators have focused on development of a browser extension that can ensure users of convenient web-based hosting services, such as GitHub or GitLab, that the server will faithfully carry out their requested actions.